Setting Up Automated Billing for Self Storage Services

Automation is a powerful tool to improve security and reduce overheads. Free up yourself or your staff by handing over routine tasks such as:

• Processing booking

• Processing payments

• Sending bills

• Inventory & delivery/collection tracking

This will improve operational efficiency and free up resources, which you can invest in building up a superior customer service, user experience improvements, or level-up your marketing. As an additional benefit, automated billing reduces the credit risk. Self storage automation opens the doors to running your facility remotely, from anywhere, with a stable internet connection. This translates into a smaller (read cheaper) office footprint.

You get all of these benefits of automation bundled up with Storeganise. Here’s how you can easily set up automated billing in your self-storage facility:

Automated Billing with Storeganise

‘General settings’ enable you to manage the settings for all users, while ‘User Details’ is for setting management of an individual customer.

The settings relevant to automated billing are ‘Billing Method’ and ‘Billing Trigger’.

Billing Method

There are two options for how customers will pay their invoices:

Payment gateway:

This is the default setting for most users. When this setting is active, the user’s registered payment method will be used (e.g., credit card). You can either manually charge the Customer’s card or have the system process it automatically (see ‘Billing trigger’ setting below). A user set to payment gateway cannot create any order from the Customer Portal unless they enter a payment method.

Invoice:

If this setting is active, the users will receive invoices. You will have to update the payment status manually when the payment is made. Users who are set to ‘Invoice’ do not have to submit payment details to create an order in the Customer Portal.

As mentioned before, ‘Payment gateway’ is the default setting. You can override it if you want to allow a customer to create orders without entering payment details or if it is a business customer whom you want to invoice manually.

Billing trigger

This setting controls how the system generates and processes invoices. You have three options available:

• Default: This will apply the default billing settings from General settings. It also is the default option when you set up. This option will only appear if you are editing the setting in ‘User details’.

• Automatic: If the user has a payment method registered (e.g. a credit card), the system will automatically charge it. If the user does not have one set up, they will receive an invoice automatically by the system.

• Manual: If this setting is active, generated invoices will go to ‘Draft’. You will have to manually send them or trigger charging from the registered payment method.

Invoice overdue age (days)

Use this setting to mark automatically after how many days an invoice is overdue. The tracking will start from the day when the invoice goes out to the Customer. The status is updated at 1 pm every day in your timezone.

You can set up automatic reminders under your email settings.

Invoice Reminders

To set up, update and manage your invoice reminders, navigate to email settings. You can create up to three invoice reminders. They will go to your customers at different time intervals unless the Customer pays.

Use the ‘+’ icon to add a new invoice reminder and set the interval. Click the ‘Create button’ when you are done to save the new reminder.

Use the ‘Edit’ button to change existing invoice reminder templates. You can change the trigger, update the content and insert placeholders. See our detailed guide for additional information.

Managing Your Self Storage with Storeganise

At Storeganise we automate every aspect of your self storage service. This includes everything mentioned in this post and much more.

Get a firsthand look by booking a personalised demo.

Related Article: Should you automate your self storage Facility